The next-generation 8K ultra-high-definition video format involves an extremely high bit rate, which imposes a high throughput requirement on the entropy decoder component of a video decoder. Context adaptive binary arithmetic coding (CABAC) is the entropy coding tool in the latest video coding standards including H.265/High Efficiency Video Coding and H.264/Advanced Video Coding. Due to critical data dependencies at the algorithm level, a CABAC decoder is difficult to be accelerated by simply leveraging parallelism and pipelining. This letter presents a new very-large-scale integration arithmetic decoder, which is the most critical bottleneck in CABAC decoding. Our design features a variable-clock-cycle-path architecture that exploits the differences in critical path delay and in probability of occurrence between various types of binary symbols (bins). The proposed design also incorporates a novel data-forwarding technique (rLPS forwarding) and a fast path-selection technique (coarse bin type decision), and is enhanced with the capability of processing additional bypass bins. As a result, its maximum throughput achieves 1010 Mbins/s in 90-nm CMOS, when decoding 0.96 bin per clock cycle at a maximum clock rate of 1053 MHz, which outperforms previous works by 19.1%.

For mobile video codecs, the huge energy dissipation for external memory traffic is a critical challenge under the battery power constraint. Lossy embedded compression (EC), as a solution to this challenge, is considered in this paper. While previous studies in lossy EC mostly focused on algorithm optimization to reduce distortion, this work, to the best of our knowledge, is the first one that addresses the distortion control. Firstly, from both theoretical analysis and experiments for distortion optimization, a conclusion is drawn that, at the frame level, allocating memory traffic evenly is a reliable approximation to the optimal solution to minimize quality loss. Then, to reduce the complexity of decoding twice, the distortion between two sequences is estimated by a linear function of that calculated within one sequence. Finally, on the basis of even allocation, the distortion control is proposed to determine the amount of memory traffic according to a given distortion limitation. With the adaptive target setting and estimating function updating in each group of pictures (GOP), the scene change in video stream is supported without adding a detector or retraining process. From experimental results, the proposed distortion control is able to accurately fix the quality loss to the target. Compared to the baseline of negative feedback on non-referred B frames, it achieves about twice memory traffic reduction.

In H.265/high efficiency video coding (HEVC) encoding, rate distortion optimization (RDO) is an important cost function for mode decision and coding structure decision. Despite being near-optimum in terms of coding efficiency, RDO suffers from a high complexity. To address this problem, this paper presents a fast RDO algorithm and its very large scale implementation (VLSI) for both intra-and inter-frame coding. The proposed algorithm employs a quantization-free framework that significantly reduces the complexity for rate and distortion optimization. Meanwhile, it maintains a low degradation of coding efficiency by taking the syntax element organization and probability model of HEVC into consideration. The algorithm is also designed with hardware architecture in mind to support an efficient VLSI implementation. When implemented in the HEVC test model, the proposed algorithm achieves 62% RDO time reduction with 1.85% coding efficiency loss for the "all-intra" configuration. The hardware implementation achieves 1.6 x higher normalized throughput relative to previous works, and it can support a throughput of 8k@30fps (for four fine-processed modes per prediction unit) with 256 k logic gates when working at 200 MHz.

3D gated clock tree synthesis (CTS) mainly consists of three steps: 1) abstract clock topology generation
2) layer embedding for minimal TSV allocation and 3) clock tree routing with gate and buffer insertion. In this paper, a self-tuning spectral clustering based nearest-neighbor selection (SSC-NNS) algorithm with parallel structure is proposed to achieve high time efficiency in clock tree topology generation, with reduced runtime. In addition, a postorder traversal based layer embedding (PTLE) strategy is adopted for determining the embedding layer of internal nodes with minimal TSVges. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves 32% and 82% runtime reduction on ISPD2009 and IBM benchmarks respectively compared with the state-of-the-art 3D work. Besides, the TSV count is also reduced by 46% on ISPD2009 benchmarks.

This paper presents an area-efficient approximate method for 32-point transform which is one of the most area-consuming parts in High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) applications. Compared to prior literatures, this work reduces the hardware cost of transform by 1) eliminating all the arithmetic operations of 6 least significant bits (LSB), 2) presenting a low-delay method for generating carry propagation from the remaining 5 LSBs and 3) truncating the most significant bits (MSB) according to the position of component. In the implementation of a 32-point forward transform, the experimental results show that 27% area consumption can be saved and the coding efficiency loss aroused by the approximation is only 0.044% compared with the origin.

Recently, the requirement for non-volatile memory on embedded systems has increased because they can be applied with normally-off and power gating technologies to. However, they have a lower endurance than volatile memories. When data is encoded as a write-reduction code appropriately, the endurance of non-volatile memory can be enhanced by writing the encoded data into the memory. We propose a highly effective write-reduction method for a multi-level cell (MLC) non-volatile memory focusing on the write-reduction code (WRC) as the optimal bit-write reduction method. The WRC can be applied only to single-level cell non-volatile memory. The proposed method generates a cell-write reduction code based on the WRC
the cell has multiple bits as the holdable data. Our proposed method achieves a cell-write reduction by 31.6% compared to the conventional method.

© 2017 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers. In this paper, a hamburger architecture with a 3D stacked reconfigurable memory is proposed for a 4K motion estimation (ME) processor. By positioning the memory dies on both the top and bottom sides of the processor die, the proposed hamburger architecture can reduce the usage of the signal through-silicon via (TSV), and balance the power delivery network and the clock tree of the entire system. It results in 1/3 reduction of the usage of signal TSVs. Moreover, a stacked reconfigurable memory architecture is proposed to reduce the fabrication complexity and further reduce the number of signal TSVs by more than 1/2. The reduction of signal TSVs in the entire design is 71.24%. Finally, we address unique issues that occur in electronic design automation (EDA) tools during 3D largescale integration (LSI) designs. As a result, a 4K ME processor with 7-die stacking 3D system-on-chip design is implemented. The proposed design can support real time 3840 × 2160 @ 120 fps encoding at 130 MHz with less than 540 mW.

© 2017 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers. High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265) obtains 50% bit rate reduction than H.264/AVC standard with comparable quality at the cost of high computational complexity. Merge mode is one of the most important new features introduced in HEVC's inter prediction. Merge mode and traditional inter mode consume about 90% of the total encoding time. To address this high complexity, this paper utilizes the merge mode to accelerate inter prediction by four strategies. 1) A merge candidate decision is proposed by the sum of absolute transformed difference (SATD) cost. 2) An early merge termination is presented with more than 90% accuracy. 3) Due to the compensation effect of merge candidates, symmetric motion partition (SMP) mode is disabled for non-8×8 coding units (CUs). 4) A fast coding unit filtering strategy is proposed to reduce the number of CUs which need to be fine-processed. Experimental results demonstrate that our fast strategies can achieve 35.4%-58.7% time reduction with 0.68%-1.96% BD-rate increment in RA case. Compared with similar works, the proposed strategies are not only among the best performing in average-case complexity reduction, but also notably outperforming in the worst cases.

© 2016 Elsevier B.V. We propose a time-of-flight (TOF) technique using plastic scintillators which have fast decay time of a few ns for positron emission tomography (PET). While the photoelectric absorption probability of the plastic for 511 keV gamma rays are extremely low due to its small density and effective atomic number, the cross section of Compton scattering is comparable to that of absorption by conventional inorganic scintillators. We thus propose TOF-PET using Compton scattering with plastic scintillators (Compton-PET), and performed fundamental experiments towards exploration of the Compton-PET capability. We demonstrated that the plastic scintillators achieved the better time resolution in comparison to LYSO(Ce) and GAGG(Ce) scintillators. In addition we evaluated the depth-of-interaction resolving capability with the plastic scintillators.

<p>For mobile video codecs, the huge energy dissipation for external memory traffic is a critical challenge under the battery power constraint. Lossy embedded compression (EC), as a solution to this challenge, is considered in this paper. While previous studies in lossy EC mostly focused on algorithm optimization to reduce distortion, this work, to the best of our knowledge, is the first one that addresses the distortion control. Firstly, from both theoretical analysis and experiments for distortion optimization, a conclusion is drawn that, at the frame level, allocating memory traffic evenly is a reliable approximation to the optimal solution to minimize quality loss. Then, to reduce the complexity of decoding twice, the distortion between two sequences is estimated by a linear function of that calculated within one sequence. Finally, on the basis of even allocation, the distortion control is proposed to determine the amount of memory traffic according to a given distortion limitation. With the adaptive target setting and estimating function updating in each group of pictures (GOP), the scene change in video stream is supported without adding a detector or retraining process. From experimental results, the proposed distortion control is able to accurately fix the quality loss to the target. Compared to the baseline of negative feedback on non-referred B frames, it achieves about twice memory traffic reduction.</p>

In this paper, a hamburger architecture with a 3D stacked reconfigurable memory is proposed for a 4K motion estimation (ME) processor. By positioning the memory dies on both the top and bottom sides of the processor die, the proposed hamburger architecture can reduce the usage of the signal through-silicon via (TSV), and balance the power delivery network and the clock tree of the entire system. It results in 1/3 reduction of the usage of signal TSVs. Moreover, a stacked reconfigurable memory architecture is proposed to reduce the fabrication complexity and further reduce the number of signal TSVs by more than 1/2. The reduction of signal TSVs in the entire design is 71.24%. Finally, we address unique issues that occur in electronic design automation (EDA) tools during 3D large-scale integration (LSI) designs. As a result, a 4K ME processor with 7-die stacking 3D system-on-chip design is implemented. The proposed design can support real time 3840 x 2160 @ 120 fps encoding at 130 MHz with less than 540 mW.

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265) obtains 50% bit rate reduction than H.264/AVC standard with comparable quality at the cost of high computational complexity. Merge mode is one of the most important new features introduced in HEVC's inter prediction. Merge mode and traditional inter mode consume about 90% of the total encoding time. To address this high complexity, this paper utilizes the merge mode to accelerate inter prediction by four strategies. 1) A merge candidate decision is proposed by the sum of absolute transformed difference (SATD) cost. 2) An early merge termination is presented with more than 90% accuracy. 3) Due to the compensation effect of merge candidates, symmetric motion partition (SMP) mode is disabled for non-8x8 coding units (CUs). 4) A fast coding unit filtering strategy is proposed to reduce the number of CUs which need to be fine-processed. Experimental results demonstrate that our fast strategies can achieve 35.4%-58.7% time reduction with 0.68%-1.96% BD-rate increment in RA case. Compared with similar works, the proposed strategies are not only among the best performing in average-case complexity reduction, but also notably outperforming in the worst cases.

8K ultra-HD is being promoted as the next-generation video specification. While the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard greatly enhances the feasibility of 8K with a doubled compression ratio, its implementation is a challenge, owing to ultrahigh-throughput requirements and increased complexity per pixel. The latter comes from the new features of HEVC. At the system level, the most challenging of them is the enlarged and highly variable-size coding/prediction/transform units, which significantly increase the requirement for on-chip memory as pipeline buffers and the difficulty in maintaining pipeline utilization. This paper presents an HEVC decoder chip featuring a system pipeline that works at a nonunified and variable granularity. The pipeline saves on-chip memory with a novel block-in-block-out queue system and a parameter delivery network, while allowing overhead-free and fully pipelined operation of the processing components. With the system pipeline design combined with various component-level optimizations, the proposed decoder in 40 nm achieves a maximum throughput of 4 Gpixels/s or 8K 120 frames/s for the low-delay-P configuration of HEVC, 7.5-55 times faster than prior works. It supports 8K 60 frames/s for the low-delay and random-access configurations. In a normalized comparison, it also shows 3.1-3.6 times better area efficiency and 31%-55% superior energy efficiency.

Copyright © 2016 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.In this paper, we present a low-power system for the de- quantization and inverse transform of HEVC. Firstly, we present a low-delay circuit to process the coded results of the syntax elements, and then reduce the number of multipliers from 16 to 4 for the de-quantization process of each 4x4 block. Secondly, we give two efficient data mapping schemes for the memory between de-quantization and inverse transform, and the memory for transpose. Thirdly, the zero information is utilized through the whole system. For two memory parts, the write and read operation of zero blocks/ rows/ coefficients can all be skipped to save the power consumption. The results show that up to 86% power consumption can be saved for the memory part under the configuration of "Random-access" and common QPs. For the logical part, the proposed architecture for de-quantization can reduce 77% area consumption. Overall, our system can support real-time coding for 8K x 4K 120 fps video sequences and the normalized area consumption can be reduced by 68% compared with the latest work.

In this paper, we present a low-power system for the de-quantization and inverse transform of HEVC. Firstly, we present a low-delay circuit to process the coded results of the syntax elements, and then reduce the number of multipliers from 16 to 4 for the de-quantization process of each 4x4 block. Secondly, we give two efficient data mapping schemes for the memory between de-quantization and inverse transform, and the memory for transpose. Thirdly, the zero information is utilized through the whole system. For two memory parts, the write and read operation of zero blocks/ rows/ coefficients can all be skipped to save the power consumption. The results show that up to 86% power consumption can be saved for the memory part under the configuration of Random-access and common QPs. For the logical part, the proposed architecture for de-quantization can reduce 77% area consumption. Overall, our system can support real-time coding for 8K x 4K 120fps video sequences and the normalized area consumption can be reduced by 68% compared with the latest work.

The latest High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265) obtains 50% bit rate reduction than H.264/AVC standard with comparable quality, but at the cost of high computational complexity. Inter prediction accounts for large complexity and merge mode is one of the most important new features introduced in HEVC. To address this issue, this paper utilizes the merge mode to accelerate inter prediction by three fast mode decision methods. 1) A merge candidate decision is proposed to select the best merge mode by Sum of Absolute Transformed Difference (SATD) cost to reduce the merge time. 2) An early merge termination is presented still based on SATD cost with more than 90% accuracy. 3) Based on efficient merge mode, symmetric motion partition (SMP) modes can be disabled for non-8 × 8 code units (CUs). Experimental results demonstrate that our work can achieve 53.1%-54.2% time reduction on average with 1.57%-2.30% BD-rate increment. Besides, our method achieves an improvement of 18%-30% time reduction with 0.89%-2.85% BD-rate increment when combined with other existing approaches.

© 2016 IEEE.8K Ultra HD is being promoted as the next-generation digital video format. From a communication channel perspective, the latest high-efficiency video coding standard (H.265/HEVC) greatly enhances the feasibility of 8K by doubling the compression ratio. Implementation of such codecs is a challenge, owing to ultra-high throughput requirements and increased complexity per pixel. The former corresponds to up to 10b/pixel, 7680×4320pixels/frame and 120fps - 80× larger than 1080p HD. The latter comes from the new features of HEVC relative to its predecessor H.264/AVC. The most challenging of them is the enlarged and highly variable-size coding/prediction/transform units (CU/PU/TU), which significantly increase: 1) the requirement for on-chip memory as pipeline buffers, 2) the difficulty in maintianing pipeline utilization, and 3) the complexity of inverse transforms (IT). This paper presents an HEVC decoder chip supporting 8K Ultra HD, featuring a 16pixel/cycle true-variable-block-size system pipeline. The pipeline: 1) saves on-chip memory with a novel block-in-block-out (BIBO) queue system and a parameter delivery network, and 2) allows high design efficiency and utilization of processing components through local synchronization. Key optimizations at the component level are also presented.

For mobile video codecs, the huge energy dissipation for external memory traffic is a critical challenge under the battery power constraint. Lossy embedded compression (EC), as a solution to this challenge, is considered in this paper. While previous studies in EC mostly focused on compression algorithms at the block level, this work, to the best of our knowledge, is the fIrst one that addresses the allocation of video quality and memory traffic at the frame level. For lossy EC, a main difficulty of its application lies in the error propagation from quality degradation of reference frames. Instinctively, it is preferred to perform more lossy EC in non-reference frames to minimize the quality loss. The analysis and experiments in this paper, however, will show lossy EC should actually be distributed to more frames. Correspondingly, for hierarchical-B GOPs, we developed an efficient allocation that outperforms the non-reference-only allocation by up to 4.5 dB in PSNR. In comparison, the proposed allocation also delivers more consistent quality between frames by having lower PSNR fluctuation.

This paper presents a three dimensional (3D) gated clock tree synthesis (CTS) approach, which consists of two steps: 1) abstract tree topology generation; and 2) 3D gated and buffered clock routing. 3D Pair Matching (3D-PM) algorithm is proposed to generate the initial tree topology and then the proposed TSV-minimization algorithm is applied to generate TSV-aware tree topology. Based on TSV-aware tree topology, 3D gated and buffered clock tree routing is done using the proposed 3D Gated and Buffered Deferred-Merge Embedding (3D-GB-DME) algorithm. The slew constraint satisfaction is considered and the clock skew is minimized in our approach. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves 29.11% power reduction compared with the state-of-the-art 2D work.

Large-scale deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are widely used in machine learning applications. While CNNs involve huge complexity, VLSI (ASIC and FPGA) chips that deliver high-density integration of computational resources are regarded as a promising platform for CNN's implementation. At massive parallelism of computational units, however, the external memory bandwidth, which is constrained by the pin count of the VLSI chip, becomes the system bottleneck. Moreover, VLSI solutions are usually regarded as a lack of the flexibility to be reconfigured for the various parameters of CNNs. This paper presents CNN-MERP to address these issues. CNN-MERP incorporates an efficient memory hierarchy that significantly reduces the bandwidth requirements from multiple optimizations including on/offchip data allocation, data flow optimization and data reuse. The proposed 2-level reconfigurability is utilized to enable fast and efficient reconfiguration, which is based on the control logic and the multiboot feature of FPGA. As a result, an external memory bandwidth requirement of 1.94MB/GFlop is achieved, which is 55% lower than prior arts. Under limited DRAM bandwidth, a system throughput of 1244GFlop/s is achieved at the Vertex UltraScale platform, which is 5.48 times higher than the state-of-the-art FPGA implementations.

This paper presents an optimization method of area and power for static memory elements by using multi-mode power gating (MMPG) scheme. A 2-transistor MMPG scheme replaces the usual 5-transistor one to effectively reduce on chip area overhead and leakage power, simultaneously combining trimming circuits (TC) to guarantee the safety of data retention. When applying the proposed approach into clean/dirty-cache (CD-cache), we can reduce area overhead and leakage power consumption. The simulation results show that the area overhead of SRAM with the proposed approach is reduced from 33.4% to 21.8% compared to that of SRAM with usual MMPG. On the other hand, leakage power is reduced by 12.35% compared to SRAM with usual MMPG and by 86.77% compared to SRAM without power gating scheme. Moreover, the ability of noise immunity of SRAM with proposed approach can also be improved.

Non-volatile memory has many advantages such as high density and low leakage power but it consumes larger writing energy than SRAM. It is quite necessary to reduce writing energy in non-volatile memory design. In this paper, we propose write-reduction codes based on error correcting codes and reduce writing energy in non-volatile memory by decreasing the number of writing bits. When a data is written into a memory cell, we do not write it directly but encode it into a codeword. In our write-reduction codes, every data corresponds to an information vector in an error-correcting code and an information vector corresponds not to a single codeword but a set of write-reduction codewords. Given a writing data and current memory bits, we can deterministically select a particular write-reduction codeword corresponding to the data to be written, where the maximum number of flipped bits are theoretically minimized. Then the number of writing bits into memory cells will also be minimized. Experimental results demonstrate that we have achieved writing-bits reduction by an average of 51% and energy reduction by an average of 33% compared to non-encoded memory.

FRC (frame re-compression) is a kind of widely used technique in reducing the SDRAM (synchronous dynamic random access memory) bandwidth of HEVC video system. However, in previous research works, FRC imposes requirements on accessing pattern and hence its usage are only limited in HEVC video codecs. While in a typical HEVC VLSI video system, there exists many other video IPs with high bandwidth requirements. Therefore, in this article, we propose a new FRC architecture to overcome the limitation and make it applicable to all the video IPs in a HEVC VLSI video system, which raises the overall bandwidth reduction rate of the whole video system. Our proposal has two points: firstly we propose a system internal bus based FRC architecture, which is independent, transparent, and easily connected to all other video IPs. Secondly, we propose a FA (freely access) scheme to remove the requirements on access pattern in previous work. By using this proposal, the bandwidth reduction rate in our VLSI video system model is raised from 92.4% to 69.6%.

Motion estimation (ME) is a key encoding component of almost all modern video coding standards. ME contributes significantly to video coding efficiency, but, it also consumes the most power of any component in a video encoder. In this paper, an ME processor with 3D stacked memory architecture is proposed to reduce memory and core power consumption. First, a memory die is designed and stacked with ME die. By adding face-to-face (F2F) pads and through-silicon-via (TSV) definitions, 2D electronic design automation (EDA) tools can be extended to support the proposed 3D stacking architecture. Moreover, a special memory controller is applied to control data transmission and timing between the memory die and the ME processor die. Finally, a 3D physical design is completed for the entire system. This design includes TSV/F2F placement, floor plan optimization, and power network generation. Compared to 2D technology, the number of input/output (IO) pins is reduced by 77%. After optimizing the floor plan of the processor die and memory die, the routing wire lengths are reduced by 13.4% and 50%, respectively. The stacking static random access memory contributes the most power reduction in this work. The simulation results show that the design can support real-time 720p @ 60 fps encoding at 8MHz using less than 65mW in power, which is much better compared to the state-of-the-art ME processor.

Recently, clock gating is utilized as a method for reducing the dynamic power of LSI. Clock gating can be automatically inserted by the synthesis tools, but there are problems such as designers must specify control signals. So more aggressive and automatable clock gating techniques have been proposed. In this study, a clock gating candidate extraction method for combinational clock gating is enhanced to the method for sequential clock gating using time expansion of sequential circuits. Using time expansion and detection by SAT, it is possible to find multiple clock past signal as a candidate. The proposed method was applied to ISCAS'89 benchmark and we got more control signal candidates.

Non-volatile memory has many advantages over SRAM. However, one of its largest problems is that it consumes a large amount of energy in writing. In this paper, we propose a bit-write reduction method based on error correcting codes for non-volatile memories. When a data is written into a memory cell, we do not write it directly but encode it into a codeword. We focus on error-correcting codes and generate new codes called write-reduction codes. In our write-reduction codes, each data corresponds to an information vector in an error-correcting code and an information vector corresponds not to a single codeword but a set of write-reduction codewords. Given a writing data and current memory bits, we can deterministically select a particular write-reduction codeword corresponding to a data to be written, where the maximum number of flipped bits are theoretically minimized. Then the number of writing bits into memory cells will also be minimized. We perform several experimental evaluations and demonstrate up to 72% energy reduction.

Non-volatile memory has many advantages such as high density and low leakage power but it consumes larger writing energy than SRAM. It is quite necessary to reduce writing energy in non-volatile memory design. In this paper, we propose write-reduction codes based on error correcting codes and reduce writing energy in non-volatile memory by decreasing the number of writing bits. When a data is written into a memory cell, we do not write it directly but encode it into a codeword. In our write-reduction codes, every data corresponds to an information vector in an error-correcting code and an information vector corresponds not to a single codeword but a set of write-reduction codewords. Given a writing data and current memory bits, we can deterministically select a particular write-reduction codeword corresponding to the data to be written, where the maximum number of flipped bits are theoretically minimized. Then the number of writing bits into memory cells will also be minimized. Experimental results demonstrate that we have achieved writing-bits reduction by an average of 51% and energy reduction by an average of 33% compared to non-encoded memory.

Motion estimation (ME) is a key encoding component of almost all modern video coding standards. ME contributes significantly to video coding efficiency, but, it also consumes the most power of any component in a video encoder. In this paper, an ME processor with 3D stacked memory architecture is proposed to reduce memory and core power consumption. First, a memory die is designed and stacked with ME die. By adding face-to-face (F2F) pads and through-silicon-via (TSV) definitions, 2D electronic design automation (EDA) tools can be extended to support the proposed 3D stacking architecture. Moreover, a special memory controller is applied to control data transmission and timing between the memory die and the ME processor die. Finally, a 3D physical design is completed for the entire system. This design includes TSV/F2F placement, floor plan optimization, and power network generation. Compared to 2D technology, the number of input/output (IO) pins is reduced by 77%. After optimizing the floor plan of the processor die and memory die, the routing wire lengths are reduced by 13.4% and 50%, respectively. The stacking static random access memory contributes the most power reduction in this work. The simulation results show that the design can support real-time 720p @ 60fps encoding at 8MHz using less than 65mW in power, which is much better compared to the state-of-the-art ME processor.

Digital video is widely used in the mobile applications, where video compression technology is necessary to store or transmit the videos. High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) achieves the highest compression ratio while it costs huge computational complexity, in which rate-distortion (RD) cost calculation takes the majority. This paper presents a low-complexity RD estimation method for HEVC intra prediction by the following schemes. 1) The transformed coefficients rather than quantized coefficients are used to do the RD estimation. 2) For the rate part, the position after the last non-zero quantized coefficient is considered to improve the accuracy of estimation, and a header-bit estimation method is presented to save about 82% complexity on header bits calculation. 3) For the distortion part, the scaling parameter of quantization is modified to the exponential of two so that the bit depth of multiplication can be reduced from 15 to 5 in the worst case. 4) In transform unit 4x4, we consider transform skip mode which is neglect in the prior research. Our proposal could achieve 72.22% time reduction of rate-distortion optimization (RDO) compared with original HEVC Test Model while the BD-rate is only 1.76%.

High efficiency video coding (HEVC) is the new generation video compression standard. Sample adaptive offset (SAO) is a new compression tool adopted in HEVC which reduces the distortion between original samples and reconstructed samples. SAO estimation is the process of determining SAO parameters in video encoding. It is divided into two phases: statistic collection and parameters determination. There are two difficulties for VLSI implementation of SAO estimation. The first is that there are huge amount of samples to deal with in statistic collection phase. The other is that the complexity of Rate Distortion Optimization (RDO) in parameters determination phase is very high. In this article, a fast SAO estimation algorithm and its corresponding VLSI architecture are proposed. For the first difficulty, we use bitmaps to collect statistics of all the 16 samples in one 4 x 4 block simultaneously. For the second difficulty, we simplify a series of complicated procedures in HM to balance the algorithms complexity and BD-rate performance. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm maintains the picture quality improvement. The VLSI design based on this algorithm can be implemented using 156.32 K gates, 8,832 bits single port RAM for 8 bits depth case. It can be synthesized to 400 MHz @ 65 nm technology and is capable of 8 K x 4 K @ 120 fps encoding.

Non-volatile memory has many advantages such as low leakage power and non-volatility. However, there are problems that a non-volatile memory consumes a large amount of energy in writing and that the maximum number of bit re-writings is limited. We have proposed a Hamming-code based bit-write reduction method using data encoding/decoding but its encoder/decoder becomes too much large. In this paper, we propose small-sized encoder/decoder circuit design for the bit-write reduction codes. In this design, we simplify data encoding/decoding by using code redundancy. Experimental results show the efficiency of our encoder/decoder design.

SAO estimation is the process of determining SAO parameters in video encoding. There are two difficulties for VLSI implementation of SAO estimation. The first is that there are huge amount of samples to deal with in statistic collection phase. The other is that the complexity of RDO in parameters determination phase is very high. In this article, a fast SAO estimation algorithm and its corresponding VLSI architecture are proposed. For the first difficulty, we use bitmaps to collect statistic of all the 16 samples in one 4×4 block simultaneously. For the second difficulty, we simplify a series of complicated procedures in HM to balance the complexity and BD-rate performance. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm maintains the picture quality improvement. The VLSI design based on this algorithm can be implemented by 156.32K gates, 8832 bits SPRAM, 400MHz @ 65nm technology and is capable of 8Kx4K @ 120fps encoding.

This paper presents a new VLSI architecture for HEVC inverse discrete cosine transform (IDCT). Compared to prior arts, this work reduces hardware cost by 1) reducing computational logic of 1-D IDCTs with a reordered parallel-in serial-out (RPISO) scheme that shares the inputs of the butterfly structure, and 2) reducing the area of the transpose buffer with a cyclic memory organization that achieves 100% I/O utilization of the SRAMs. In the implementation of a unified 4/8/16/32-point IDCT, the proposed schemes demonstrate 35% and 62% reduction of logic and memory costs, respectively. The IDCT implementation can support real-time decoding of 4Kx2K 60fps video with a total hardware cost of 357,250um(2) on 2-D IDCT and 80,988um(2) on transpose memory in 90nm process.

High efficiency video coding (HEVC) is the new generation video compression standard. Sample adaptive offset (SAO) is a new compression tool adopted in HEVC which reduces the distortion between original samples and reconstructed samples. SAO estimation is the process of determining SAO parameters in video encoding. It is divided into two phases: statistic collection and parameters determination. There are two difficulties for VLSI implementation of SAO estimation. The first is that there are huge amount of samples to deal with in statistic collection phase. The other is that the complexity of Rate Distortion Optimization (RDO) in parameters determination phase is very high. In this article, a fast SAO estimation algorithm and its corresponding VLSI architecture are proposed. For the first difficulty, we use bitmaps to collect statistics of all the 16 samples in one 4×4 block simultaneously. For the second difficulty, we simplify a series of complicated procedures in HM to balance the algorithms complexity and BD-rate performance. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm maintains the picture quality improvement. The VLSI design based on this algorithm can be implemented using 156.32K gates, 8,832bits single port RAM for 8bits depth case. It can be synthesized to 400MHz @ 65nm technology and is capable of 8K×4K @ 120fps encoding.

In order to reduce the power consumption of LSI, unnecessary parts should be powered off with fine granularity, and current status data before power-off should be stored for the behavior after power-on. Next generation non-volatile memory is expected to be used to store data for power-off. However, the writing power of non-volatile memory is about 10 times higher than that of CMOS memory, so the reduction of writing behaviors is very important to reduce the total energy. The manuscript proposes a reduction method of writing behaviors using the difference of the original data and the new data for monitoring data sequences such as wireless sensor nodes. With the redundancy of the difference and the original data, the number of writing bits for these registers can be saved. The modificaiton system for the original and differential data registers has been developed and its power consumption has been evaluated. When applying to temperature monitoring, 24 % writing bits reduction and 11 % power reduction can be obtained.

Pseudo Power Gating (Pseudo PG) is one of gate level power reduction methods for combinational circuits by stopping unnecessary input changes of gates. In Pseudo PG, an extra control signal might be added to a gate and other input changes of the gate are deactivated when the control signal takes the controlling value. To improve the power reduction capability, the paper newly introduces dual-stage Pseudo PG with advanced clustering algorithm where up to two extra control signals are added to a gate if effective. The advanced clustering algorithm selects the first control signal to be compatible with the second control signal based on the propagation of controlling condition via a path, with which candidates of controllable gates excluded by the maximum depth constraint can be controlled. Experimental results show that the proposed dual-stage Pseudo PG method has obtained 23.23% average power reduction with 5.28% delay penalty with respect to the original circuits, and has obtained 10.46% more power reduction with 2.75% delay penalty compared with respect to circuits applying the original single-stage Pseudo PG.

Recently, the next generation non-volatile memory/register using magnetic tunnel junction elements has been paid attention. Such devices can keep the data when power off, can be integrated in CMOS LSI and have fast access speed. By using such devices, we can apply fine and low overhead power control for CMOS LSI. The write energy of such devices, however, is larger than that of a usual D flip-flop (about 10 times). So it is very important to reduce the write operations on such devices. Therefore we have proposed a write reduction method for non-volatile registers, where a minimum cut-set that has the smallest switching activity is searched by using the min-cut max-flow theorem and non-volatile registers are inserted to the cut-set. In this study, we also consider the overhead of additional circuits for recovering and saving the state to minimize the total power of the circuit. The method has been implemented and applied to ISCAS 89 benchmarks. Compared with the case where non-volatile registers are inserted to the original position, 2.6%〜15.1% power reductions (8.34% on average) have been found.

Non-volatile memory has many advantages over SRAM, such as high density, low leakage power, and non-volatility. However, one of its largest problems is that it consumes a large amount of energy in writing. It is quite necessary to reduce the number of writing bits and thus decrease its writing energy. We have proposed a memory writing reduction method based on error correcting codes. When a data is written into a memory, we do not write it directly but encode it into a codeword. Then the number of writing bits into memory is also limited in data writing. In this paper, we demonstrate several experimental evaluations from the viewpoints of energy reduction and discuss the effectiveness of our proposed writing-reduction codes.

Recently, the next generation non-volatile memory/register using magnetic tunnel junction elements has been paid attention. Such devices can keep the data when power off, can be integrated in CMOS LSI and have fast access speed. By using such devices, we can apply fine and low overhead power control for CMOS LSI. The write energy of such devices, however, is larger than that of a usual D flip-flop (about 10 times). So it is very important to reduce the write operations on such devices. Therefore we have proposed a write reduction method for non-volatile registers, where a minimum cut-set that has the smallest switching activity is searched by using the min-cut max-flow theorem and non-volatile registers are inserted to the cut-set. In this study, we also consider the overhead of additional circuits for recovering and saving the state to minimize the total power of the circuit. The method has been implemented and applied to ISCAS 89 benchmarks. Compared with the case where non-volatile registers are inserted to the original position, 2.6%〜15.1% power reductions (8.34% on average) have been found.

Digital Signal Processing of sounds and images are using many digital filters which computes the summation of multiplications between a sequence of constants and a time sequence of an input. In this manuscript, a memory based design method for such constant multiplication is described. In the design, the trade-off between the size of a memory and that of the logic is considered, and its speed and power consumption is optimized. The read power of a memory is independent with the output read from the memory and a memory can encapsulate the toggles of logic gates in gate-based designs. By separating an input into several parts and designing such separated small multipliers using a memory, the memory size can be reduced drastically. The proposed constant multiplier has been implemented on ASIC, and shows the power reduction compared with gate-level design.

Non-volatile memory has many advantages over SRAM, such as high density, low leakage power, and non-volatility. However, one of its largest problems is that it consumes a large amount of energy in writing. It is quite necessary to reduce the number of writing bits and thus decrease its writing energy. In this paper, we propose a memory writing reduction method based on state encoding limiting maximum Hamming distance. When a data is written into a memory, we do not write it directly but encode it into a codeword. Then we write the codeword into a memory. At this time, we encode a data into a codeword limiting its maximum Hamming distance from another codeword. If the maximum Hamming distance is limited among all the codewords, the number of flipped bits are also limited and then the number of writing bits will be reduced. We show several experimental evaluations and discuss the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm.

A non-volatile memory has advantages such as low leak energy and non-volatility compared with SRAM or DRAM has high leak energy. It is strongly expected to use a non-volatile memory for realizing normally-off systems. A non-volatile memory, however, consumes more energy to write than SRAM or DRAM. In this paper, we evaluate energy consumption of a cache memory in an embedded processor with non-volatile memories. In our evaluation, we assume that their write energy is 1.0x to 10.0x higher than that of SRAM. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that using non-volatile memories in a cache is better choice in some cases, even when write energy of non-volatile memories is 10.0x higher than that of SRAM.

Nonvolatile flip-flop enables leakage power reduction in logic circuits and quick return from standby mode. However, it has limited write endurance, and its power consumption for writing is larger than that of conventional D flip-flop (DFF). For this reason, it is important to reduce the number of write operations. The write operations can be reduced by stopping the clock signal to synchronous flip-flops because write operations are executed only when the clock is applied to the flip-flops. In such clock gating, a method using Exclusive OR (XOR) of the current value and the new value as the control signal is well known. The XOR based method is effective, but there are several cases where the write operations can be reduced even if the current value and the new value are different. The paper proposes a method to detect such unnecessary write operations based on state transition analysis, and proposes a write control method to save power consumption of nonvolatile flip-flops. In the method, redundant bits are detected to reduce the number of write operations. If the next state and the outputs do not depend on some current bit, the bit is redundant and not necessary to write. The method is based on Binary Decision Diagram (BDD) calculation. We construct write control circuits to stop the clock signal by converting BDDs representing a set of states where write operations are unnecessary. Proposed method can be combined with the XOR based method and reduce the total write operations. We apply combined method to some benchmark circuits and estimate the power consumption with Synopsys NanoSim. On average, 15.0% power consumption can be reduced compared with only the XOR based method.

Power gating technology is useful in reducing standby leakage current. Controlling value based power gating is a fine-grained power gating approach using the controlling value of logic elements. However, power saving capability suffers from the steady maximum depth constraint, which prohibits the power gating assignment when the control of a gate increases the critical path length. To increase power savings, this paper proposes a power gating control extraction method based on controllability propagation and power-off probability. Multiple power domains can be clustered by a smaller depth signal with the controllability propagation. Experimental results show that 21.4% power reduction can be obtained in average, achieving 8.5% improvement compared with previous algorithm. © 2013 IEEE.

As leakage power of traditional SRAM becomes larger, a ratio of static energy in total energy of memory architecture becomes also larger. Non-volatile memory (NVM) has many advantages over SRAM, such as high density, low leakage power, and non-volatility, but consumes too much write energy. In this paper, we evaluate energy consumption of two-level cache using NVM in part on mobile processors and confirm that it effectively reduces energy consumption.

Multi-operand adders that calculate the summation of more than two operands usually consist of compressor trees, which reduce the number of operands to two without any carry propagation, and carry-propagate adders for the two operands in the ASIC implementation. Compressor trees that consist of full adders and half adders cannot be implemented efficiently on LUT-based FPGAs, and carry-chains or dedicated structures have been utilized to produce multi-operand adders on FPGAs. Recent studies indicate that compressor trees can be implemented efficiently on LUTs using Generalized Parallel Counters (GPCs) as the building blocks of compressor trees. This paper addresses the problem of synthesizing compressor trees based on GPCs. Based on the observation that characteristics such as the area, power, and delay correlate roughly to the total number and the maximum level of GPCs, the target problem can be regarded as a minimization problem for the total number of GPCs and the maximum levels of the GPCs, for which an ILP-based approach is proposed. The key point of our formulation is not to model the problem based on the structures of compressor trees like the existing approach, but instead the compression process itself is used to reduce the number of variables and constraints in the ILP formulation. The experimental results demonstrate the advantage of our formulation in terms of the quality and runtime.Copyright © 2013 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.

In recent years, the demand for low-power design has remained undiminished. In this paper, a pseudo power gating (SPG) structure using a normal logic cell is proposed to extend the power gating to an ultrafine grained region at the gate level. In the proposed method, the controlling value of a logic element is used to control the switching activity of modules computing other inputs of the element. For each element, there exists a submodule controlled by an input to the element. Power reduction is maximized by controlling the order of the submodule selection. A basic algorithm and a switching activity first algorithm have been developed to optimize the power. In this application, a steady maximum depth constraint is added to prevent the depth increase caused by the insertion of the control signal. In this work, various factors affecting the power consumption of library level circuits with the SPG are determined. In such factors, the occurrence of glitches increases the power consumption and a method to reduce the occurrence of glitches is proposed by considering the parity of inverters. The proposed SPG method was evaluated through the simulation of the netlist extracted from the layout using the VDEC Rohm 0.18 mu m process. Experiments on ISCAS'85 benchmarks show that the reduction in total power consumption achieved is 13% on average with a 2.5% circuit delay degradation. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method under different primary input statistics is considered.

Clock gating is supported by commercial tools as a power optimization feature based on the guard signal described in HDL (structural method). However, the identification of control signals for gated registers is hard and designer-intensive work. Besides, since the clock gating cells also consume power, it is imperative to minimize the number of inserted clock gating cells and their switching activities for power optimization. In this paper, we propose an automatic multi-stage clock gating algorithm with ILP (Integer Linear Programming) formulation, including clock gating control candidate extraction, constraints construction and optimum control signal selection. By multi-stage clock gating, unnecessary clock pulses to clock gating cells can be avoided by other clock gating cells, so that the switching activity of clock gating cells can be reduced. We find that any multi-stage control signals are also single-stage control signals, and any combination of signals can be selected from single-stage candidates. The proposed method can be applied to 3 or more cascaded stages. The multi-stage clock gating optimization problem is formulated as constraints in LP format for the selection of cascaded clock-gating order of multi-stage candidate combinations, and a commercial ILP solver (IBM CPLEX) is applied to obtain the control signals for each register with minimum switching activity. Those signals are used to generate a gate level description with guarded registers from original design, and a commercial synthesis and layout tools are applied to obtain the circuit with multi-stage clock gating. For a set of benchmark circuits and a Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) Decoder (6.6k gates, 212 F.F.s), the proposed method is applied and actual power consumption is estimated using Synopsys NanoSim after layout. On average, 31% actual power reduction has been obtained compared with original designs with structural clock gating, and more than 10% improvement has been achieved for some circuits compared with single-stage optimization method. CPU time for optimum multi-stage control selection is several seconds for up to 25k variables in LP format. By applying the proposed clock gating, area can also be reduced since the multiplexors controlling register inputs are eliminated.

In recent years, the demand for low-power design has remained undiminished. In this paper, a pseudo power gating (SPG) structure using a normal logic cell is proposed to extend the power gating to an ultrafine grained region at the gate level. In the proposed method, the controlling value of a logic element is used to control the switching activity of modules computing other inputs of the element. For each element, there exists a submodule controlled by an input to the element. Power reduction is maximized by controlling the order of the submodule selection. A basic algorithm and a switching activity first algorithm have been developed to optimize the power. In this application, a steady maximum depth constraint is added to prevent the depth increase caused by the insertion of the control signal. In this work, various factors affecting the power consumption of library level circuits with the SPG are determined. In such factors, the occurrence of glitches increases the power consumption and a method to reduce the occurrence of glitches is proposed by considering the parity of inverters. The proposed SPG method was evaluated through the simulation of the netlist extracted from the layout using the VDEC Rohm 0.18 μm process. Experiments on ISCAS'85 benchmarks show that the reduction in total power consumption achieved is 13% on average with a 2.5% circuit delay degradation. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method under different primary input statistics is considered. Copyright © 2012 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.

Multi-operand adders, which calculates the summation of more than two operands, usually consist of compressor trees which reduce the number of operands to two without any carry propagation, and a carry-propagate adder for the two operands in ASIC implementation. The former part is usually realized using full adders or (3;2) counters like Wallace-trees in ASIC, while adder trees or dedicated hardware are used in FPGA. In this paper, an approach to realize compression trees on FPGAs is proposed. In case of FPGA with m-input LUT, any counters with up to m inputs can be realized with one LUT per an output. Our approach utilizes generalized parallel counters (GPCs) with up to m inputs and synthesizes high-performance compressor trees by setting some intermediate height limits in the compression process like Dadda's multipliers. Experimental results show that the number of GPCs are reduced by up to 22% compared to the existing heuristic. Its effectivity on reduction of delay is also shown against existing approaches on Altera's Stratix III.

Leakage power is growing comparable to dynamic power dissipation as a result of technology trends, and thus it has become an important issue in low-power circuit design. As a popular technique for standby power reduction, power gating is applied to high-parallel LDPC decoder for WiMAX standard. The clustered-block processing engine (CBPE) array are divided into 9 power domains, and they are switched on or off according to different code lengths of LDPC code defined in WiMAX standard. As CBPE array occupies about 70% of the decoder system, the dedicated power gating strategy is very effective in shorter code length case since more power domains can be switched off. At shortest code length, power gating design brings about 55% power reduction compared to that of longest code length. © 2011 IEEE.

Recent researches have indicated that multi-operand addition on FPGAs can be efficiently realized as the architecture consisting of a compressor tree which reduces the number of operands and a carry-propagate adder like ASIC by utilizing generalized parallel counters(GPCs). This paper addresses power and delay aware synthesis of GPC-based compressor trees. Based on the observation that dynamic power would correlate to the number of GPCs and the levels of GPCs, our approach targets to minimize the maximum levels and the total number of GPCs, and an ILP-based algorithm and heuristic approaches are proposed. Several experiments targeting Altera Stratix III architecture show that the proposed approach reduced the delay by up to 20% under a slight increase in total power dissipation. © 2011 IEEE.

Clock gating is a power efficient technique by switching off unnecessary clock signals to the registers. The condition under which the registers can be safely gated is checked using EXOR of the current and the next state values. Due to the extra power consumed by clock gating logics consisting of a latch and an AND gate, we have proposed an optimum sharing method of gating controls based on BDD (Binary Decision Diagram) with single-stage clock gating for power optimization. In this paper, we enhance the optimization method including multi-stage clock gating and compare with structural gating approach. By multi-stage clock gating, the activities of both registers and clock gating logics can be reduced. On a set of interface circuits, we have obtained power reduction by 14.1% on average compared with single-stage structural method and by 10.8% compared with multi-stage structural gating approach. Our BDD based method is also fast and scalable by candidates pruning.

Clock gating is the insertion of control signal for registers to switch off unnecessary clock signals selectively without violating the functional correctness of the original design so as to reduce the dynamic power consumption Commercial EDA tools usually have a mechanism to generate clock gating logic based on the structural method where the con trol signals specified by designers are used and the effectiveness of the clock gating depends on the specified control signals In the research we focus on the automatic clock gating logic generation and propose a method based on the candidate extraction and control signal selection We formalize the control signal selection using linear formulae and devise an optimization method based on BDD The method is effective for circuits with a lot of shared candidates by different registers The method is applied to counter circuits to check the co relation with power simulation results and a set of benchmark circuits 19 1-71 9% power reduction has been found on counter circuitsafter layout and 2 3-18 0% cost reduction on benchmark circuits

Multi-operand adders usually consist of compression trees which reduce the number of operands per a bit to two, and a carry-propagate adder for the two operands in ASIC implementation. The former part is usually realized using full adders or (3;2) counters like Wallace-trees in ASIC, while adder trees or dedicated hardware are used in FPGA. In this paper, an approach to realize compression trees on FPGAs is proposed. In case of FPGA with m-input LUT, any counters with up to m inputs can be realized with one LUT per an output. Our approach utilizes generalized parallel counters (GPCs) with up to m inputs and synthesizes high-performance compression trees by setting some intermediate height limits in the compression process like Dadda's multipliers. Experimental results show its effectiveness against existing approaches at GPC level and on Altera's Stratix III.

In this paper. a new heuristic algorithm is proposed to optimize the power domain clustering in controlling-value-based (CV-based) power gating technology. In this algorithm, both the switching activity of sleep signals (p) and the overall numbers of sleep gates (gate count, N) are considered, and the sum of the product of p and N is optimized. The algorithm effectively exerts the total power reduction obtained from the CV-based power gating. Even when the maximum depth is kept to be the same, the proposed algorithm can still achieve power reduction approximately 10% more than that of the prior algorithms. Furthermore, detailed comparison between the proposed heuristic algorithm and other possible heuristic algorithms are also presented. HSPICE simulation results show that over 26% of total power reduction can be obtained by using the new heuristic algorithm. In addition, the effect of dynamic power reduction through the CV-based power gating method and the delay overhead caused by the switching of sleep transistors are also shown in this paper.

Checker synthesis for assertion based verification becomes popular because of the recent progress on the FPGA prototyping environment. In the paper, we propose a checker synthesis method based on the finite input-memory automaton suitable for embedded RAM modules in FPGA. There are more than 1 Mbit memories in medium size FPGA's and such embedded memory cells have the capability to be used as the shift registers. The main idea is to construct a checker circuit using the finite input-memory automata and implement shift register chain by logic elements or embedded RAM modules. When using RAM module, the method does not consume any logic element for storing the value. Note that the shift register chain of input memory can be shared with different assertions and we can reduce the hardware resource significantly. We have checked the effectiveness of the proposed method using several assertions.

Leakage power consumption of logic elements has become a serious problem, especially in the sub-100-nanometer process. In this paper, a novel power gating approach by using the controlling value of logic elements is proposed, In the proposed method, sleep signals of the power-gated blocks are extracted completely front the original circuits Without any extra logic element. A basic algorithm and it probability-based heuristic algorithm have been developed to implement the basic idea. The steady maximum delay constraint has also been introduced to handle the delay issues. Experiments on the ISCAS'85 benchmarks show that averagely 15-36% of logic elements could he power gated at a time for random input patterns, and 3-31% of elements could be stopped under the steady maximum delay constraints. we also show a power optimizition method for AND/OR tree circuits, in which more than 80% of gates can be power-gated.

This paper proposes all efficient design algorithm for power/ground (P/G) network synthesis with dynamic signal consideration, which is mainly caused by Ldi/dt noise and Cdv/dt decoupling capacitance (DE-CAP) Current in the distribution network. To deal with the nonlinear global optimization under synthesis constraints directly, the genetic algorithm (GA) is introduced. The proposed GA-based synthesis method call avoid the linear transformation loss and the restraint condition complexity in current SLP, SQP, ICG, and random-walk methods. In the proposed Hybrid Grid Synthesis algorithm, the dynamic signal is simulated in the gene disturbance process, and Trapezoidal Modified Euler (TME) method is introduced to realize the precise dynamic time step process. We also use a hybrid-SLP method to reduce the genetic execute time and increase the network synthesis efficiency. Experimental results on given power distribution network show the reduction on layout area and execution time compared with current P/G network synthesis methods.

Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) technology enhances instruction throughput by issuing multiple instructions from multiple threads within one clock cycle. For in-order pipeline to each thread, SMT processors can provide large number of issued instructions close to or surpass than using out-of-order pipeline. In this work, we show an efficient issue logic for predicated instruction sequence with the parallel flag in each instruction, where the predicate register based issue control is adopted and the continuous instructions with the parallel flag of V are executed in parallel. The flag is pre-defined by a compiler. Instructions from different threads are issued based on the round-robin order. We also introduce an Instruction Queue skip mechanism for thread if the queue is empty. Using this kind of issue logic, we designed a 6 threads, 7-stage, in-order pipeline processor. Based on this processor, we compare round-robin issue policy (RR(T-1-T-n)) with other policies: thread one always has the highest priority (PR(T-1)) and thread one or thread n has the highest priority in turn (PR(T-1-T-n)). The results show that RR(T-1-T-n) policy outperforms others and PR(T-1-T-n) is almost the same to RR(T-1-T-n) from the point ofview of the issued instructions per cycle.

This paper addresses parallel prefix adder synthesis which targets minimization of the total switching activities under bitwise timing constraints. This problem is treated as synthesis of prefix graphs which represent global structures of parallel prefix adders at technology-independent level. An approach for timing-driven area minimization has been proposed which first finds the exact minimum solution on a specific subset of prefix graphs by dynamic programming, then restructures the result for further reduction by removing restriction on the subset. This approach can be applied for switching cost minimization almost directly, though it is not so effective as area minimization in some cases. In this paper, a heuristic is proposed which estimates the effect of the restructuring phase and improve cost calculation fo some specific cases. Through various kinds of experiments, conditions where this approach can be executed effectively is also discussed.

Lack of complete formal specification is one of the major obstacles to the deployment of model checking. Coverage estimation addresses this issue by revealing the unverified part of the design according to the specified properties. In this paper we propose a new transition-based coverage metric to evaluate the completeness of properties for symbolic model checking. Our coverage metric pinpoints the transitions through which the values of signals are checked. An efficient symbolic algorithm is presented for computing the transition coverage for a subset of ACTL. Our coverage estimator has been applied to the model checking of a cache coherence protocol. We uncovered several coverage holes including one that eventually led to the discovery of a design bug.

High-level synthesis is a novel method to generate a RT-level hardware description automatically from a high-level language such as C, and is used at recent digital circuit design. Floating-point to fixed-point conversion with bit-length optimization is one of the key issues for the area and speed optimization in high-level synthesis. However, the conversion task is a rather tedious work for designers. This paper,introduces automatic bit-length optimization method on floating-point to fixed-point conversion for high-level synthesis. The method estimates computational errors statistically, and formalizes an optimization problem as a non-linear problem. The application of NLP technique improves the balancing between computational accuracy and total hardware cost. Various constraints such as unit sharing, maximum bit-length of function units can be modeled easily, too. Experimental result shows that our method is fast compared with typical one, and reduces the hardware area.

This paper presents a test input data compression technique, Selective Low-Care Coding (SLC), which can he used to significantly reduce input test data volume as well as the external test channel requirement for multiscan-based designs. In the proposed SLC scheme, we explored the linear dependencies of the internal scan chains, and instead of encoding all the specified bits in test cubes, only a smaller amount of specified bits are selected for encoding, thus greater compression can be expected. Experiments on the larger benchmark circuits show drastic reduction in test data volume with corresponding savings on test application time can be indeed achieved even for the well-compacted test set. Copyright © 2006 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.

This paper proposes a new multiscan-based test input data compression technique by employing a Fan-out Compression Scan Architecture (FCSCAN) for test cost reduction. The basic idea of FCSCAN is to target the minority specified 1 or 0 bits (either 1 or 0) in scan slices for compression. Due to the low specified bit density in test cube set, FCSCAN can significantly reduce input test data volume and the number of required test channels so as to reduce test cost. The FCSCAN technique is easy to be implemented with small hardware overhead and does not need any special ATPG for test generation. In addition, based on the theoretical compression efficiency analysis, improved procedures are also proposed for the FCSCAN to achieve further compression. Experimental results on both benchmark circuits and one real industrial design indicate that drastic reduction in test cost can be indeed achieved.

Lack of complete formal specification is one of the major obstacles for the deployment of model checking. Coverage estimation addresses this issue by revealing the unverified part of the design according to the specified properties. In this paper we propose a new transition-based coverage metric to evaluate the completeness of properties for symbolic model checking. It is more comprehensive and accurate than the existing coverage metrics for model checking. An efficient symbolic algorithm is presented for computing the transition coverage for a subset of ACTL. Our coverage estimator has been applied to the model checking of a cache coherence protocol. We uncovered several coverage holes including one that eventually led to the discovery of a design bug.

This paper presents a new DFT technique that can significantly reduce test data volume as well as scan-in power consumption for multiscan-based designs. It can also help to reduce test time and tester channel requirements with small hardware overhead. In the proposed approach, we start with apre-computed test cube set and fill the don't-cares with proper values for joint reduction of test data volume and scan power consumption. In addition we explore the linear dependencies of the scan chains to construct a fanout structure only with inverters to achieve further compression. Experimental results for the larger ISCAS'89 benchmarks show the efficiency of the proposed technique. © 2005 IEEE.

In modern microprocessors, the access time of register file becomes a critical part in total delay. Instruction level or thread level parallelism improves Instructions Per. Cycle (IPC) by executing multiple instructions in one cycle. Such multiple instructions need to read or write data from/to register files simultaneously. To satisfy that, register file with sufficient ports should be designed. However, the area and access time of register file with large ports will increase sharply. Duplicated Register File (DupRF) architecture can reduce access time by distributing read ports. In this paper, we propose a new kind of DupRF architecture for embedded Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) microprocessor and estimate the effect with respect to the area and access time. Especially, we measure the product of area and access time as computation cost. For a SMT microprocessor with 6 threads, 64-bit data-width and 6 function units, a 3-duplicate register file architecture can reduce access time by 12.61% with a slight increase of computation cost by 3.35% compared with the central register file architecture.

Model checking can exhaustively verify a set of specified properties on a given implementation. However, it is very hard to determine whether sufficient properties have been speci ed or not. In this paper, we propose a transition traversal coverage method for a subset of CTL to evaluate the completeness, of properties. With this method, we can detect the transitions which are not veri ed by any property. It is more comprehensive and accurate than state-based coverage metric. We avoid generating the perturbed implementation by directly traversing transitions based on the semantics of CTL formulas. Experimental results show that the proposed method can discover subtle coverage holes with low computation cost.

Test data volume and power consumption for scan-based designs are two major concerns in system-on-a-chip testing. However, test set compaction by filling the don't-cares will invariably increase the scan-in power dissipation for scan testing, then the goals of test data reduction and low-power scan testing appear to be conflicted. Therefore, in this paper we present a selective scan chain reconfiguration method for test data compression and scan-in power reduction. The proposed method analyzes the compatibility of the internal scan cells for a given test set and then divides the scan cells into compatible classes. After the scan chain reconfiguration a dictionary is built to indicate the run-length of each compatible class and only the scan-in data for each class should be transferred from the ATE to the CUT so as to reduce test data volume. Experimental results for the larger ISCAS' 89 benchmarks show that the proposed approach overcomes the limitations of traditional run-length coding techniques, and leads to highly reduced test data volume with significant power savings during scan testing in all cases.

In this paper, we present a test data compression technique to reduce test data volume for multiscan-based designs. In our method the internal scan chains are divided into equal sized groups and two dictionaries were build to encode either an entire slice or a subset of the slice. Depending on the codeword, the decompressor may load all scan chains or may load only a group of the scan chains, which can enhance the effectiveness of dictionary-based compression. In contrast to previous dictionary coding techniques, even for the CUT with a large number of scan chains, the proposed approach can achieve satisfied reduction in test data volume with a reasonable smaller dictionary. Experimental results showed the proposed test scheme works particularly well for the large ISCAS'89 benchmarks.

Test data volume and scan power are two major concerns in SoC test. In this paper we present an alternative run-length coding method through scan chain reconfiguration to reduce both test data volume and scan-in power consumption. The proposed method analyzes the compatibility of the internal scan cells for a given test set and then divides the scan cells into compatible classes. To extract the compatible scan cells we apply a heuristic algorithm by solving the graph coloring problem
and then a simple greedy algorithm is used to configure the scan chain for the minimization of scan power. Experimental results for the larger IS-CAS'89 benchmarks show that the proposed approach leads to highly reduced test data volume with significant power savings during scan test.

In the hardware synthesis from high-level language such as C, bit length of variables is one of the key issues on the area and speed optimization. Usually, designers are required to specify the word length of each variable manually, and verify the correctness by the simulation on huge data. In this paper, we propose an optimization method of fractional wold length of floating-point variables in the floating to fixed-point conversion of variables. The amount of round-off errors are formulated with parameters and propagated via data flow graphs. The non-linear programming is used to solve the fractional wordlength minimization problem. The method does not require the simulation on huge data, and is very fast compared to ones based on the simulation. We have shown the effect on several programs.

This paper presents a new test data compression technique for multiscan-based designs through dictionary-based encoding on the single or sequences scan-inputs. In spite of its simplicity, it achieves significant reduction in test data volume. Unlike some previous approaches on test data compression, our approach eliminates the need for additional synchronization and handshaking between the CUT and the ATE, so it is especially suitable to be integrated in a low cost test scheme for SoC test In addition in contrast to previous dictionary-based coding techniques, even for the CUT with a small number of scan chains, the proposed approach can achieve satisfied reduction in test data volume. Experimental results showed the proposed test scheme works particularly well for the large ISCAS'89 benchmarks.

Reseeding technique is proposed to improve the fault coverage in pseudo-random testing. However most of previous works on reseeding is based on storing the seeds in an external tester or in a ROM. In this paper we present a built-in reseeding technique for LFSR-based test pattern generation. The proposed structure can run both in pseudorandom mode and in reseeding mode. Besides, our method requires no storage for the seeds since in reseeding mode the seeds can be generated automatically in hardware. In this paper we also propose an efficient grouping algorithm based on simulated annealing to optimize test vector grouping. Experimental results for benchmark circuits indicate the superiority of our technique against other reseeding methods with respect to test length and area overhead. Moreover, since the theoretical properties of LFSRs are preserved, our method could be beneficially used in conjunction with any other techniques proposed so far.

The paper describes the folding method of logic functions to reduce the size of memories to keep the functions. The folding is based on the relation of fractions of logic functions. If the logic function includes 2 or 3 same parts, then only one part should be kept and other parts can be omitted. We show that the logic function of I-bit addition can be reduced to half size using the bit-wise NOT relation and the bit-wise OR relation. The paper also introduces 3-1 LUT's with the folding mechanism. A full adder can be implemented using only one 3-1 LUT with the folding. Multi-bit AND and OR operations can be mapped to our LUT's not using the extra cascading circuit but using the carry circuit for addition. We have also tested the mapping capability of 4 input functions to our 3-1 LUT's with folding and carry propagation mechanisms. We have shown the reduction of the area consumption when using our LUT's compared to the case using 4-1 LUT's on several benchmark circuits.

The paper describes the folding method of logic functions to reduce the size of memories for keeping the functions. The folding is based on the relation of fractions of logic functions. We show that the fractions of the full adder function have the bit-wise NOT relation and the bit-wise OR relation, and that the memory size becomes half (8-bit). We propose a new 3-1 LUT with the folding mechanisms whcih can implement a full adder with one LUT. A fast carry propagation line is introduced for a multi-bit addition. The folding and fast carry propagation mechanisms are shown to be useful to implement other multi-bit operations and general 4 input functions without extra hardware resources. The paper shows the reduction of the area consumption when using our LUTs compared to the case using 4-1 LUTs on several benchmark circuits.

In the paper, we present a real-time speech recognition chip for monosyllables such as A, B,.,., etc. The chip recognizes up to 64 monosyllables based on the Hidden Markov Model (HMM), which is a well known speaker-independent recognition method. The chip accepts a short-speech frame including 256 16-bit digitized samples corresponding to 11.6 msec period, and outputs the 6-bit symbol code of monosyllables for 16 short-frames (corresponding to 185.6 msec), A learning circuit to update HMM parameters for the recognition chip has also been designed, and the recognition chip includes an interface to the learning circuit. We have fabricated the recognition chip by VDEC Rohm 0.6 mum process on a 4.5 mm x 4.5 mm chip. We have also made a layout of the entire circuit including the learning circuit by VDEC Rohm 0.35 mum process on a 4.9 mm x 4.9 mm chip.

In the paper, a real-time 64-mono-syllable recognition LSI is presented. The LSI accepts 11.6 msec speech frame and outputs a 6-bit symbol-code for each frame by the end of the next frame with the pipelining manner. The recognition method is based on the Hidden Markov Model and is speaker-independent. An on-chip learning mechanism has also been designed, but the circuit is off-chip at present implementation because of the restriction of LSI area, The LSI is fablicated by VDEC Rohm with 0.6 mum process on a 4.5 mm x 4.5 mm chip.

Multi-cycle paths are paths between registers where 2 or more clock cycles are allowed to propagate signals, and the detection of multi-cycle paths is important in deciding proper clock period, timing verification and logic optimization. This paper presents a satisfiability-based multi-cycle paths detection method, where the detection problems are reduced to CNF formulae and the satisfiability is checked using SAT provers. We also show heuristics on conversion from multi-level circuits into CNF formulae. We have applied our method of ISCAS'89 benchmarks and other sample circuits. Experimental results show the remarkable improvements on the size of manipulatable circuits.

Combinational logic circuits are usually implemented as multi-level networks of logic nodes, Multi-level logic simplification using the don't cares on each node is widely used. Large don't cares give good simplification results, but suffer from huge memory area and computation time. Extraction of useful don't cares and reduction of the size of the don't cares are important problems on the simplification using don't cares. In the paper, we propose a new robust heuristic method for the selection of dent cares. MIF consider an adaptive subnetwork for each simplified node in the network and introduce a stepwise enhancement method of the subnetwork considering the memory area and the network structure. The don't cares extracted from the adaptive subnetworks are called the local don't cares. We have implemented our method for satisfiability don't cares and observability don't cares. We have applied the method on MCNC89 benchmarks, and compared the experimental results with those of the SIS system. The results demonstrate the superiority of our method on the quality of the results and on the size of applicable circuits.

The paper presents an application specific Java processor including reconfigurabilities, which is a DLX like pipeline processor with 5 stages and executes Java byte codes directly. Reconfigurabilities are the key technologies for application specific operations. We have introduced two reconfigurabilities: (1) a mechanism to override the control signals for a specific instruction, (2) external components can be attached with the same input and output ports as the internal ALU. © 2000 IEEE.

We present a satisfiability based multi-clock path analysis method. The method uses propositional satisfiability (SAT) in the detection of multi-clock paths. We show a method to reduce the multi-clock path detection problems to SAT problems. We also show heuristics on the conversion from multi-level circuits into CNF formulae. We have applied our method to ISCAS89 benchmarks and other sample circuits. Experimental results show the improvement on the manipulatable size of circuits by using SAT. © 2000 IEEE.

In several design methods for Pass-transistor Logic (PTL) circuits, Boolean functions are expressed as OBDDs in decomposed form and then the component OBDDs are directly mapped to PTL cells. The total size of OBDDs (number of nodes) corresponds to the circuit size. In this paper, we investigate a method for PTL synthesis based on exact minimization of Free BDDs (FBDDs). FBDDs are well-studied extension of OBDDs with free variable ordering on each path. We present statistics showing that more than 56% of 616126 iu:PN-equivalence classes of 5-variable Boolean functions have minimum FBDDs with less size than their OBDDs. This result can be used for PTL synthesis as libraries. We also applied the exact minimization algorithm of FBDDs to the minimization of subcircuits in the synthesis for MCNC benchmarks and found up to 5% size reduction.

In the hardware synthesis methods with high level languages such as C language, optimization quality of the compilers has a great influence on the area and speed of the synthesized circuits. Among hardware-oriented optimization methods required in such compilers, minimization of the bit length of the data-paths is one of the most important issues. In this paper, rye propose an estimation algorithm of the necessary bit length of variables for this aim. The algorithm analyzes the control/dataflow graph translated from C programs and decides the bit length of each variable. On several experiments, the bit length of variables can be reduced by half with respect to the declared length. This method is effective not only for reducing the circuit area but also for reducing the delay of the operation units such as adders.

This paper introduces a new kind of false path, which is sensitizable but does not affect the decision of the maximum clock frequency. Such false paths exist in multi-clock operations controlled by waiting states, and the delay time of these paths can be greater than the clock period. This paper proposes a method to detect these waiting false paths based on the symbolic state traversal. In this method, the maximum allowable clock cycle of each path is computed using update cycles of each register.